Fishing for Souls, by Adriaen van de Venne, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company’s $4 billion fundraise, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities California is still not building enough housing. “ After years of n...
0.0 Context Setting
Friday, 14 August 2026 in Portland, Oregon, pretty much straight after finishing a live show. I’ve got a full day and this is an attempt at getting a newsletter out in a respectable amount of time without overloading people with words. Short is definitely better sometimes.
0.1 Events
The next How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary is on Friday 21 August at 9am Pacific. You should register for it . Here’s Marcin’s bio:
Marcin Wichary started his career ...
I am converting the notes for “Managing Research Software Projects” from McCole to Quarto.
Most of the changes have gone smoothly, but I’m stuck on a few things and would appreciate guidance.
For reference, the materials are in this repository and you can view the rendered version here .
The landing page shows the contents of index.qmd (which is good)
but that page shows up as entry #1 in the table of contents (which is bad).
I have tried using a # Title heading in in...
(what if) home pages (were, are) ever-changing poems(?) (what if) home pages (were, are) ever-changing poems(?) (what if) home pages (were, are) ever-changing poems(?)
See the previous post for context and explanation of SSI .
After reading Chris Fallin’s aegraph
post , new ZJIT contributor dak2
landed a block-local version of the canonicalize function in
#16828 .
The pseudocode of the block-local canonicalize function looks like this:
for block in function . reverse_post_order ():
rewrite_map = {}
for insn in block . insns :
insn . operands . map_in_place ( lambda o : rewrite_map . get ( o , o ))
...
Fiction
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino . Beautiful prose and
imagination.
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño . Beautiful and surreal
prose, but completely unpretentious.
Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm . I had already
read most of these but they are very, very good, and it was a pleasure to read
them again.
⭐️ Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman . Usually when I hear “it’s a
900 page Russian epic about three generations of a family living throu...
Introduction
In the Livelymerge project, Dan Ingalls, Peter van Hardenberg, and I (Alex Warth) are building a Lively Kernel-like system whose heap is an Automerge document. (See my previous lab note for the details of our object model.) The whole point of this arrangement is that every object is persistent and shared: if you and I are looking at the same document, we’re looking at the same objects, and they’ll still be there two weeks from now.
It didn’t take much multi-user testin...
My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven
Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents
to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was
curious if this really makes a difference, so conducted a few experiments .
more…
My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven
Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents
to use TDD when building software. ...
Setting up the test foundations using Testcontainers and transactions for AI-enabled applications with C# and .NET Setting up the test foundations using Testcontainers and transactions for AI-enabled applications with C# and .NET
In some ways, we know aging when we see it, from the graying of hair to the wrinkling of skin to declines in motor, sensory, and cognitive capacities. Yet the underlying biology of aging remains a matter of uncertainty and debate. Many lines of research align with the theory that aging is a direct result of decay — the inevitable degradation of molecules (including proteins or DNA), organelles…
Source In some ways, we know aging when we see it, from the graying of hair to the wrinkling of...
Autonomy at the Speed of the Mission
shield.ai
This blog is the first in a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of AI and autonomy.
In a contested environment, yesterday’s software is rarely enough for tomorrow’s mission. Autonomy has to be adaptable by the operator as the mission changes. Historically, changing how an autonomous system behaves has meant changing its software. An operator identifies a gap, then engineers modify the code, retest, recertify as required, and redeploy. The process exists for...
Printing Lists
Aug 14, 2026
To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element:
for (items, 0 ..) | item, item_index | {
if (item_index > 0 ) std.debug.print( ", " );
std.debug.print( "{}" , .{item});
}
Printing Lists
Aug 14, 2026
To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element:
for (items, 0 ..) | item, item_index | {...
AI-assisted programming is fast evolving and there is a tension between ‘we no longer need to understand the code’ and ‘what is my purpose as a programmer’. I recorded a short video on this topic with how I think the tension can result in conflicts.
AI-assisted programming is fast evolving and there is a tension between ‘we no longer need to understand the code’ and ‘what is my purpose as a programmer’. I recorded a short video on this topic with how I think the tension can ...
In the month of April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, emissions, tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanics’, combined with a slight delay on parts I ordered. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 hours I was riding back in a tow truck. In the month of April my ...
Enjoying Idaho while ignoring Illinois Today is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice. As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and about 160 of my colleagues, staff and faculty, untenured and tenured, lost our positions at Illinois Tech after they declared "financial exigency" which allows them to eliminate tenured positions. I'll use this post to tell my story, but keep in mind there are 160 other ones. The president announced that he would be asking the board to d...
Tigris has a pretty advanced replication scheme for writes. What happens when
you actually need to delete things? Turns out deleting things is hard in
distributed systems. Especially when you have a geo-replicated active-active
database like Tigris does. We can (and do) use tombstones to mark where data
once was, but how do you let people undo an accidental delete?
Tigris wants to turn storage
inside out ,
so our implementation of soft d...
This is one of those philosophical posts that’s as much a reminder for myself as it is for all you lovely people who read my ramblings. I mean, I’ve always written this blog assuming I’m the only person who reads it, partly because I think I very much should be the only person reading this. But I digress.
So much of modern consumer culture comes down to curating a sense of the following three things:
Scarcity.
Urgency.
Off by one errors.
I… wait, damn it.
The...
One of my favourite things to do online is perusing the IndieWeb . It's fun, and I've been able to discover a tonne of interesting people along the way. But every now and then, I come across someone who has published their salary history on their site.
At first, I thought this was a great idea. It feels transparent, and it theoretically gives people an idea of what they could or should be earning in a particular field. But as I've discovered more people doing this (for the record, I've only s...
Craft launched from Luna, no tether can go farther, faster while being lighter Exploring more worlds with joy and curiosity hosting ideas, deploying empathy and even skepticism for humanity From the edge of a gravitational well they can push the discourse and shape its course All of these futures can bloom with the fervor and fragrance of you. Illustration of a rocket taking off from a Moonbase. Image: SpaceX Poem notes: I love writing poetry where words allude to technical space themes. It...
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Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading. Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading.
Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we are automatically generating more and more explanatory artifacts instead of writing them, navigating codebases as a human is becoming an exercise in futility.
I’m not the only one:
We are already constantly drowning in tech jargon, much of which comes to us presented through brea...
A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site.
Read more on the site… A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site.
Read more on the site… A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… Read more on the site…
